Premise: Mysterious creatures called ‘Mimics’ have laid siege to Earth. The storyline puts a Groundhog Day plot device into a futuristic alien invasion storyline as a young inexperienced private gets killed in action only to be reborn the day before to suffer the same fate. Eventually, he becomes a better warrior and that other circumstances are changing, which might be the key to altering the outcome.
Genre: Science Fiction
Writer: Dante Harper
Details: 4/1/10 – first draft – 118 pages
About: Warner Bros paid low-7 figures against a purchase price near $3 million for a Dante Harper-scripted adaptation of All You Need is Kill, a Japanese novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Warner’s execs Jon Berg and production president Greg Silverman moved preemptively for the property and made a deal with an aggressive progress to production clause that will likely get the film before the cameras within 12 months. This was a big sale in April and at 3 million a record price for the year.
Related Viewing: Starship Troopers, Groundhog Day, District 9, Full Metal Jacket, Doom.
Synopsis: We start “in medias res” on a United Defense force drop shop. These soldiers wear futuristic exo-jackets and acrylic like faceplates. We meet PVT BILLY CAGE and PVT YONABURU and other kids heading into certain death. These “soldiers” are no older than 20. They’re afraid, they’re nervous and they don’t want to jump out of a plane.
In a visual splendor the drop ships take fire, careening out of the sky as the kids fall out the back and hit the beach in “The Battle of Ruby Tuesday!” A Saving Private Ryan like storming of the beach ensues. Mass confusion, explosions and lot’s of shaky hand held camera most likely follows.
The kids are surprised to be alive, awkwardly move in their exo-jackets towards a large trench, where they await the onslaught of the enemy horde. A soldier is speared by a “projectile javelin” that is “other worldly” and “bio-mechanical’” in nature. The MIMIC HORDE swarms the trench; a glistening Bio-Mass of insect like creatures (Starship Troopers anyone?) lays waste to lots of people.
As all seems lost, DOG COMPANY SOLDIERS led by SERGEANT MAJOR RITA VRATASKI (AKA THE FULL METAL BITCH) spring into action. They’ve been to battle many times, their exo-jackets dented and splashed with graffiti. Rita is a God like entity that wields a large TUNGSTEN CARBIDE BATTLE AXE and she shreds the Mimics like a girl possessed, a natural killing machine with grace and skill unmatched on the battlefield. She is, at most, 23 years old.
As Rita fights, CAGE runs in the other direction, screaming like the child he is. Yonaburu chases after him. They run into a group of MIMIC scouts that send Javelins into both of them. Cage goes down fighting, but bleeds out. He wakes up later, a Mimic standing over him. Cage fires on this “special rainbow colored” Mimic, his bullets well placed between the Mimic’s amour, “SILVER BLACK TENDRILS” drizzle onto Cage’s exposed body at 600 degrees, it’s a horrible death. (12 pages in)
In a rush we’re in the barracks, Cage sits up in bed SCREAMING and everyone in the barracks wonders what the hell is going on. Cage is confused. That was one vivid nightmare, right? Cage finds himself the day before the battle, the morning before the night liquor raid and sluggishly going through an ordinary day as an infantryman. Each detail here is important because the audience is going to see this day play out over and over again.
SGT. Farell barges into the barracks catching everyone off guard. He gives everyone a hard time, playing the role Stephen Lang championed in Avatar and R. Lee Ermey championed in Full Metal Jacket. He’s a big hard on for protocol and this group of slackers is in for a world of s**t. It’s obstacle course time for them.
In the midst of the obstacle course Cage can’t shake his déjà vu. Cage tells Yonaburu that he knew everything that was going to happen and everything that Farell was going to say. Yonaburu is skeptical but Cage proceeds to list off everything that’s going to happen on the obstacle course before it does so, this is more than coincidence. Cage does not predict The Full Metal B***h showing up, we see her in plain cloths, a small delicate girl unlike the Amazonian killing machine we know her to be. Cage is in awe/love with her (how can he NOT be).
We’re in “battle readiness debriefing theater,” the calm before the storm. We finally see some STAKES (never really enough btw) and realize the Mimics have swarmed most of the known world and the upcoming Battle of Ruby Tuesday is really the WORLD’s last stand. Sgt Farell offers “in jacket training” that none of the kids want, they’re too busy planning a liquor raid, to get faded the night before battle. They succeed in getting wasted later.
Everybody gets ready for battle in the morning, CAGE is strapped with as much ammo as he can carry, we relive the Battle of Ruby Tuesday a second time, with the gift of hindsight. Everything is exactly as before, except the weather has changed. It will ALWAYS change. There are more Mimics than the last time, they seem to have LEARNED something. Cage saves Yonaburu, but get’s a 90mm round blown through his chest, immediately followed by Yonaburu’s head being blown off. End Scene.
And we’re back in the Barracks as CAGE wakes up in a cold sweat screaming, everybody staring, same as before. Cage goes a little nutty this time round, tries to explain this LOOP he’s in to medics and the sergeant. They think he’s section 8. Cage runs away, going AWOL towards the beach. A old man and girl are there, a MIMC AQUA SCOUT emerges from the water and kills them all.
Wake up again in the morning. He’s crying, but not out loud. Get’s up as normal, grabs a gun, and blows his head off. Wakes up again the morning. Leaves silently. Writes a “5” on the back of his hand and as he tracks his many lives. We go to the Holovid Library to get some much needed back story on the Mimics and the battle. Several pages of exposition in “Why we fight” style news reels and back-story on Rita. She’s really good because “she plays lots of video games.”
With every new life, Cage begins to learn and ask questions. He takes SGT FARELL up on his offer to teach “in jacket” fighting. Cage gets better. Cage begins to use his knowledge to affect the outcome of events. Cage gets better at sparring and more fearless in battle, dying each time but taking more and more mimics with him. Cage begins to play battle games, seeing how far he can go before dying. After intense fight training, Cage wants to know how Rita is so fast. Sgt Farell obliges by modifying his fighting suit, taking it off “auto balance” and allowing his mobility to equal that of Rita’s. He now has 187 on the back of his hand, that’s how many times he’s died.
Cage barters for a BATTLE AX. This is round 203 now. Cage is in battle and it’s no hold bard. Everybody is amazed at his grace and skill as he takes off the head of a 30 ft Mega Reever. Everybody cheers as this stage of the battle is finally clear. He dies at 4:19 each time however, never quite making it to 4:20 (insert joke here).
Cage with a 214 on his hand now. He’s pissed that he “times out” before finishing his mission. This time Cage get’s really drunk. Does some crazy stuff, stops caring about his task and goes through the motions. He CLEAVES mimics every where he goes, but there is no longer emotion in him. Rita joins him in a fight. Back to back they fight, a perfect team of Mimic destruction. Rita finally asks, “How many loops is this for you?” At which point a Mega Reever shows up as the clock turns 4:20, game over.
On the 329th time Cage figures this little game out. He finds a way to get back to Rita, to ask her questions and gets some answers. But Rita does not recall their conversation nor does she experience the same loop that Cage does. She did of course, but found a way out of the loop, after 411 cycles.
I’m not going to ruin the the 3rd act here or give away the ending. The 3rd act consists of Rita helping Cage and their love interest blossoming. There are many more “loops” for Cage but his purpose is now falling for Rita in addition to figuring a way out of the loop. In many respects he’d rather stay in the loop to be with Rita. The “rainbow colored Mimic” plays a crucial role and does Rita herself. In the end Cage is what you would expect him to be towards the end of a video game, after leveling up many times and having explored the battle field time and time again in this Sci-Fi RPG adventure. The “answer” to the narrative puzzle leaves much to be desired and the personal STAKES for Cage are always low. He get’s to go again if he fails.
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General Comments: The 3 million dollar spec script? Really?
First of all, I’d like to say there’s nothing inherently wrong with this script. It boils down to style and taste. It’s well written, at 118 pages it’s not too long, it’s filled with eye popping action, violence, special effects and it screams to be filmed and released in 3D (Thanks WB!). There’s a highly quotable “mentor” character in Sgt Farell that acts much like a Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix or the aforementioned Colonel Miles Quaritch from Avatar. This character, tough as nails, speaks in a philosophical prose that feeds the current military industrial complex. So this script is, in many ways, everything Hollywood is clamoring for. It’s based on source material (a heavily illustrated Novel) that’s grounded in anime/manga roots and acts as a vehicle for protagonists in their early 20’s. The fact that many elements, locations and events are repeated, will certainly help keep costs in check as well (less sets to build, repeating visual effects). And finally, the whole narrative mimics (pun!) a video game and as such, represents a potential franchise.
It’s the age old Hollywood battle between style and substance, the former at the expense of the latter, which seems par for the course in today’s market place. WB would like you to think that “All you need is Kill” but, personally, I need a plot with purpose and actual character development in addition to all the “kill.”
Analysis
Story: The Video Game Dilemma
This is NOT a video game adaptation but it’s sure as hell written like one. We go to battle, we die, we get to start over, we get better strategy and better in battle. We get farther and farther each time until we beat the level of the Battle of Ruby Tuesday.
I’m not a huge gamer but I did my fare share of RPG games. This script could easily be a Starcraft adaptation with the Mimic’s just being the Zerg Swarm. There’s really nothing more to the story than that: it’s a rambling episodic narrative puzzle that fails to relate (as a human interest story) to the characters. The point of the story is not the arc of the character but the violent destruction of it’s faceless, insect like antagonist and the constant “leveling up” of the main character into a well oiled fighting machine. There is certainly pleasure in playing that person in a game, but how much pleasure is there in watching it? Without that first hand involvement it has a boring and repetitive tonality to it that begins to get old around page 50.
The pitfalls of video game adaptations are in the shallow depth of character and overly simplistic plot. The “fun” is derived from the endless game play and multitudes of options that exist in exploring the “world” of the game and killing as many Mimics as possible in as many imaginative ways as possible. I’m not invested in the character when I’m not playing the game. The story of ‘All you need is Kill’ is just that, and lacks the sense of discovery you get while navigating the world for yourself.
The “narrative puzzle” that I mentioned earlier comes in the form of a temporal loop plot device that fails to deliver the requisite “understanding” as to why he’s stuck in the loop in the first place and doesn’t seem to learn anything about himself in the process. The whole story lives by this “narrative puzzle” and as such also dies by it.
Plot: The “Groundhog’s Day” Dilemma
This script utilizes the time loop narrative made popular in Groundhog Day. There are several other spec scripts from last year that did the same thing. The Days Before by Chad St. John and Ben Ripley’s Source Code (currently in production) are 2 such examples. Both were worthy of Black List mentions. There are others as well , Shadow 17 comes to mind. Ironically, WB has the rights to 2 of the 3.
A time loop or temporal loop is a common plot device dating back to Greek mythology. This situation resembles the mythological punishment of Sisyphus, condemned to repeatedly push a stone uphill only to have it roll back down once he reached the top, and Prometheus, condemned to have his liver torn out and eaten by an eagle each morning. The plot is advanced by having one or more central characters retain their memory or become aware of the loop through déjà vu. Stories with time loops commonly center on correcting past mistakes or on getting a character to recognize some key truth; thus allowing them to escape from the loop. That last point is crucial to the device (and missing from this story).
Groundhog Day is considered a tale of self-improvement that emphasizes the need to look inside oneself and realize that satisfaction in life comes from benefiting the lives of others rather than the selfishness of one’s own wants and desires. The phrase also has become a shorthand illustration for the concept of spiritual transcendence. Buddhists see such themes of selflessness and rebirth as a reflection of their spiritual messages. This concept plays out in Hindu faith as a form of reincarnation and also, in the Catholic tradition, seen as a representation of Purgatory. Groundhog Day found great success as an existentialist comedy in large part to Bill Murray as an actor and in large part to the message it gave.
This applies to All You Need is Kill because that final message of spiritual transcendence and self-improvement is somewhat misplaced. The only form of self-improvement Cage makes is how to become a better and more efficient killing machine. Only when you have nothing can you truly succeed as a soldier, only when you no longer care about life and risk everything can you succeed in overcoming the limitations of the self in war. This script reinforces the fight to win mentality of the military at all costs and offers no form of self-discovery or purpose in the end. There is no “key truth” to speak of.
The plot “thickens” here and there but essentially, All You Need is Kill utilizes this plot device to no end. This is why we find the ending so hollow and bereft of meaning. Once we’re clued in to WHY Cage is caught in the Loop, it doesn’t really make any sense. We just accept it as a ‘Fait Accompli’ that needs no logical explanation.
Post Script: The “tone” of this movie will be very, very important. The filmmakers and studios have the task of distancing themselves from Starship Troopers, which is quite similar in a lot of ways. Cage is the young Johnny Rico of the future!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[X] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius